Logical Transition Examples—To Redirect

The best legal writers know how to quickly pivot away from bad facts and irrelevant arguments. Do so seamlessly (as they do) with the phrases below.

• Case citations have been replaced by “. . .” to shorten these passages and to allow you to digest them more easily.

At any rate

1. Example from Justice Kagan: “And then, there’s the appropriation of those notes, and accompanying words, for use in new and different ways. Stravinsky reportedly said that great composers do not imitate, but instead steal. . . . At any rate, he would have known. He took music from all over—from Russian folk melodies to Schoenberg—and made it inimitably his own.”
2. Example from Kannon Shanmugam: “But any overlap would exist under either interpretation; it depends on the respective meanings of ‘sale’ and ‘use,’ not on whether those actions make the claimed invention available to the public. At any rate, under petitioner’s interpretation, the on-sale and public-use bars would serve independent functions. For example, ‘[an] offer to sell is enough to bar patentability whether or not the offer is accepted,’ . . . while ‘public use’ requires ‘actual use by someone at some point.’”
3. Example from Don Verrilli: “Finally, the asserted interest in proceeding with caution pending state experimentation with the definition of marriage likewise lacks a basis in DOMA or the House Report. Section 3, at any rate, affects the institution of marriage, if at all, only ‘at the margin.’ . . . Section 3, moreover, is not framed as a temporary measure designed to facilitate further study.”

Even more to the point

1. Example from Don Verrilli: “Of course, that would not provide a basis for denying FERC’s authority here, as respondents have acknowledged (Br. 46) that States do lack the authority to regulate the wholesale demand-response practices covered by the Rule. Even more to the point, respondents’ view has been rejected again and again by this Court, in cases that respondents do not even discuss.”
2. Example from Justice Alito: “At the same time, however, the Court made it clear that it was not equating a violation of the Miranda rules with an outright Fifth Amendment violation. For one thing, it reiterated Miranda’s observation that ‘the Constitution would not preclude legislative solutions that differed from the prescribed Miranda warnings but which were “at least as effective in apprising accused persons”’ of their rights. . . . Even more to the point, the Court rejected the dissent’s argument that § 3501 could not be held unconstitutional unless ‘Miranda warnings are required by the Constitution, in the sense that nothing else will suffice to satisfy constitutional requirements.’”
3. Example from Justice Kagan: “But another course would have been easier still: throwing out the motion for raising repetitive claims. And even more to the point, that course would usually have been required if the dissent were right that Rule 59(e) motions counted as successive. Although pre-AEDPA courts had some discretion around the edges, the consideration of successive petitions was supposed to be ‘rare.’”

In all events

1. Example from Paul Clement: “But even the government’s own source acknowledges that ‘liability’ was found in ‘100 percent’ of FTC proceedings, ‘exclud[ing]’ only a handful of cases that were ‘dismissed’ due to ‘a change in the law.’ . . . In all events, whether the FTC’s record is more like the 1995-96 Bulls or the 1972 Dolphins is beside the point. There is no denying that the decks are so heavily stacked in the FTC’s favor that it takes a bold party indeed to run the full gauntlet of an administrative proceeding in hopes of obtaining a judicial oversight at the end of that costly process, especially if the only likely ‘remedy’ at that point is a remand for another round of costly proceedings before the same agency.”
2. Example from David Frederick: “Petitioners have offered no new (much less ‘special’) justifications, just ‘“wrong on the merits”-type arguments’ to which stare decisis ‘does not ordinarily bend.’ . . . In all events, petitioners’ argument ignores the key differences between collective bargaining and political lobbying. . . . Even to the extent collective bargaining may touch on some topics that could also be the subject of lobbying, the subject matter of speech is not the only determinant of whether it is ‘political speech.’”
3. Example from Lisa Blatt: “The law in all events fails intermediate scrutiny under Central Hudson. Vermont’s asserted interest in prescriber privacy is illusory. The law permits widespread disclosure of prescription history information so long as it will not be used by a pharmaceutical company to communicate with doctors. Indeed, the law is designed to encourage a myriad of other healthcare entities to use the information to influence doctors to prescribe the cheapest medicine that could be considered medically appropriate.”

In any event

1. Example from Justice Scalia: “Without the preposition, ‘bear arms’ normally meant (as it continues to mean today) what Justice Ginsburg’s opinion in Muscarello said. In any event, the meaning of ‘bear arms’ that petitioners and Justice Stevens propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning.”
2. Example from Chief Justice Roberts: “While there is evidence to support the contention of the candidates and independent expenditure groups that the matching funds provision burdens their speech, ‘it is never easy to prove a negative’—here, that candidates and groups did not speak or limited their speech because of the Arizona law. . . . In any event, the burden imposed by the matching funds provision is evident and inherent in the choice that confronts privately financed candidates and independent expenditure groups.”
3. Example from Justice Kavanaugh: “District courts and courts of appeals applying the usual four-factor standard for a discretionary stay often deny stays in §16(a) appeals because courts applying that test often do not consider litigation-related burdens (here, from the continued District Court proceedings) to constitute irreparable harm. . . . In any event, the background Griggs rule applies regardless of how often courts might otherwise grant stays under the ordinary discretionary stay factors.”